If you want to encode or decode MIME words (such as =?ISO-8859-2?Q?_=E1ll_e=E1r?=) found in e-mail message headers (mostly Subject,
From and To),
the recommended Perl module to use is MIME::AltWords.
Please don't use MIME::AltWords0 (which is useless by itself anyway) or MIME::Words (version 5.420 has several serious bugs both with encoding and decoding).

Most users shouldn't read on,
but they should read MIME::AltWords instead.

In an array context, splits the ENCODED string into a list of decoded [DATA, CHARSET] pairs, and returns that list. Unencoded data are returned in a 1-element array [DATA], giving an effective CHARSET of undef.

In the event of a syntax error, $@ will be set to a description of the error, but parsing will continue as best as possible (so as to get something back when decoding headers). $@ will be false if no error was detected.

Any arguments past the ENCODED string are taken to define a hash of options: